


Space Is Big, So Hold On Tight

by psocoptera



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Chewie isn't into humans sexually, Intercultural relationships, Multi, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Sedoretu, queer sedoretu, same-moiety relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-19
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:33:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21842227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psocoptera/pseuds/psocoptera
Summary: Finn found another girl, so now they can all get married, right?
Relationships: Chewbacca/Leia Organa/Luke Skywalker/Han Solo, Leia Organa/Amilyn Holdo/Lando Calrissian/Original Female Character, Leia Organa/Han Solo/Chewbacca/Lando Calrissian, Poe Dameron/Finn/Rey/Rose Tico
Comments: 14
Kudos: 118





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Set shortly after the end of Last Jedi.
> 
> Hi! If you found this from the sedoretu tag, you know the deal. If not, [here's a link to the sedoretu page on Fanlore](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Sedoretu). Very briefly, a sedoretu is a fictional four-person marriage invented by Ursula Le Guin, consisting of a Morning man, a Morning woman, an Evening man, and an Evening woman in four sub-pairings, the Morning marriage (Morning woman and Evening man), Evening marriage (Evening woman and Morning man), Day marriage (both women) and Night marriage (both men). People aren't supposed to have sex with anyone in their same moiety (Morning or Evening).
> 
> EDITED: Apparently I came up with a name for a minor OC that was so Star Wars that it's literally the name of a character in the new movie. I didn't know that when I wrote it, but I think it's confusing, so I'm going to change her name in this story, and Janna is now Venna.

Leia finds Poe with his head in his hands, and the expression of someone who would clearly be drinking if they had any alcohol. This is not unreasonable - they've all just been through a lot, most of it terrible - but Leia doesn't think this is self-recrimination for the big mistakes. This is something more personal.

"You ever completely blow up your life?" Poe says, and then the colossal unfortunateness of that phrasing must hit him, because his eyes go big and he opens his mouth like he's about to fly that back faster than anyone has ever back-flown before.

Leia puts on her best "soothing the children" face - also works on planetary administrators - and sits down next to Poe, holding up her hand to stop him before he can get going.

"Want to tell me about it?" she asks, since he obviously does, and she would find it soothing to be able to solve somebody's problem.

"So, Finn and I," Poe starts, and then obviously gives up on finding a predicate for that sentence. "Finn and Rey," he tries, before shaking his head. "Look, nobody's _done_ anything - there's nothing you could put a name to - but..."

Leia could help, but it's probably good for him to let him squirm. That's what she's claiming, anyways.

"I thought we were all on the same page," Poe says. "So when Finn comes to me and says 'oh, woe, everything's gotten so complicated', I said, 'what do you mean, this is great! you found another girl and now we can all get married!'"

 _Oh boy_ , Leia thinks.

"So first of all it turned out Finn hadn't even heard of a sedoretu, he'd barely met anyone in a pair marriage, and secondly he's interested in _both_ of them. And obviously he's not going to have moiety, given the whole 'taken from his family' thing - maybe his parents didn't either, I know it's a big galaxy and there's a lot of ways of doing things - but..." He pauses. "Alderaan had moieties, right?"

Leia nods. "We did," she says, voice rough the way it always gets when she talks about her obliterated homeland, even now.

"So you know how when you're... when someone's out-moiety, it's easy to just think of them as where they'd fit, right? I'm Evening, so Finn's Morning. If Finn's Morning, Rey better be Evening - Rey of course also has no idea because Jakku is a hardscrabble shithole that can't afford nice things like cultural traditions - but then here's this new girl, and maybe Rey and Finn actually have more of a comrade thing going, and _I_ can be flexible - " He trails off, making a flip-flopping hand gesture possibly meant to convey the options he'd presented to Finn.

"So anyways," Poe finishes glumly, "Finn is furious, the girls are confused, and I'm going to die alone in space without ever making a marriage."

Leia considers this. "On Hays Minor they practiced sibling-group marriage," she says. "A woman and her sisters would marry a family of brothers. But not their sisters, and their sisters couldn't marry the woman's brothers, either. If you didn't have the right siblings you weren't much of a prospect."

Poe looks blank.

"Rose is from Hays Minor," Leia says patiently.

"Huh," Poe says. "That's weird. I mean, about the siblings, that's, like, backwards."

Leia shrugs a little. The galaxy is big, what can you do.

"When her sister died," Poe says suddenly. "That must have - " He looks alarmed.

"Probably," Leia agrees. It would be fun, if mean, to make him finish more of his sentences, but she doesn't really need him to. Poe is obviously sympathetic to the upheaval Paige's death must have caused in Rose's future options. He's a good kid, really. Good heart. Might survive long enough to outgrow the dumb.

"Let me tell you about my marriages," Leia says. It's probably time for the part of the conversation where she sorts Poe out. "I made three of 'em, believe it or not, but none of them were proper, the way you and I were brought up. I'm Morning, and so Luke was Morning too, of course, once we figured that out. He hadn't grown up knowing - it was about the only thing my adoptive parents did tell me, about my past, but Luke's aunt and uncle never mentioned it. Moiety doesn't last long in slave societies; they probably never thought about it."

She eyes Poe, who is nodding along with this. "You've read that awful unauthorized biography."

Poe looks sheepish. God, he's probably trying not to blurt out that he's seen the holodramas, too.

"Ok," Leia says. "So you know all this."

"No!" Poe says. "I'm listening!"

"So, Lando would never admit to having a moiety," Leia says. "Lando also did not appreciate the overemphasis on binary gender - people were more uptight about it, before post-Alderaanian reconstructionism - anyways, he would have been our fourth, but given his pre-existing relationship with Han, I couldn't see letting him claim to be Evening. It was actually Han who pointed out that he already had another life partner, and that turned out to work just fine."

Poe makes a face. Leia has watched hundreds of people, in her life, make the same face. She calls it "did you really fuck that Wookiee", a mix of prurient curiosity and anticipatory recoil. Almost nobody is rude enough to actually ask. Even the dreadful biography had been carefully non-libelous. She watches Poe make faces for a moment, then takes pity on him.

"Chewie wasn't into nakes," she says. "There's no rule that all four couples have to be sexual, you know. I mean, yes, that's the expectation, that's the tradition, but I don't think a weak Day marriage or Evening marriage is where we went wrong, not at all." That something did go very wrong, she doesn't bother to spell out.

"You shouldn't feel like you have to talk about it," Poe says, in that overly-kind way that people tiptoe around grief.

"Luke was studying all these old Jedi traditions," Leia says. Of course she doesn't _have_ to talk about it. As if she'd do anything she wasn't willing to do. "He got it into his head that he wasn't supposed to be married, that to be a proper Jedi he had to go off and start a temple, and maybe we could have talked him out of it, but we didn't know any better. So, that happened. So much for marriage number one."

"Lando had been around as Uncle Lando," she goes on. "But when Luke left, Han... Han really leaned on him." She sighs. "It was my bright idea to marry him, though. Like we could just slot him in where Luke had been and keep going. Chewie was against it, but human customs had never made much sense to him, so when I told him I thought it was a good idea, he went along with it. He and Lando were mostly getting along again, by then, but I'm not sure either of them ever really considered themselves married to each other."

"I thought when Han and Chewie left, Lando would go with them for sure. But it turned out he took his marriage to me as seriously as his marriage to Han, even though we weren't even a couple. He would have - he never took moiety seriously. He would have married me again as the Morning marriage if it wouldn't have been such a scandal. Of course it turned out that Amilyn had Venna, and then there we were. But he would have."

"WAIT," Poe says.

"Oh, yes," Leia says. "I don't think they'd mind you knowing, now that they're both dead. They were lovers long before Amilyn and I got back together. They were just very good at being discreet."

"Holy shit," Poe says. "That didn't bother you?"

"When I was sixteen I would have been shocked," Leia says. "But by then... Lando thought Venna was great, it wasn't like Amilyn was going to stop it with her if we _didn't_ get married, and - things were getting bad, by then." She puts her hand on Poe's arm. "This is what I wanted to tell you, why I subjected you to all that ancient history. Sometimes you just have to find love where you can. If you're lucky enough to find people who work together, sometimes it's worth thinking about whether the voice of propriety needs to be the one you listen to." She closes her eyes for a moment. "I'm not sure there are any marriages left in the Resistance that haven't lost someone. But then there's the four of you. You haven't lost your chance at anything, yet."

"So you don't think it's... wrong. If Finn..."

Leia snorts. "I'm not saying he's immune to doing wrong, but if he feels that way about all three of you, there isn't going to be a trace of guilt in it for him, so why try to push that onto him? Finn and Rey are both about as out-moiety as humans can get. If Rey and Rose get along, I'd say you have yourself a marriage."

"Finn's still mad at me," Poe says.

"Finn will stop being mad at you once you explain you got hung up on your cultural programming," Leia says, fighting the urge to roll her eyes. Finn pours out love the way Luke used to, even if he wants to pretend otherwise.

"And other people - " Poe starts.

"Nobody is going to bat an eye at Rey doing whatever the hell she pleases," Leia says bluntly. "Sometimes I think I made a mistake in not swinging my own lightsaber around, no one expects Jedi to follow norms. Anyone who doesn't know any better will assume the other three of you are Rey's harem, or that you and Finn are a Guardian pair, or whatever nonsense they want to come up with. And anyone who does know you will be too busy hoping you four save all our asses to worry about it."

There's a slow brightening on Poe's face, like a moon coming out from behind the shadow of a planet. God, he's so in love. Leia feels about a million years old, watching that.

"I have to go talk to Finn," he says, leaping to his feet. He dashes off without looking back.

"Didn't expect a thank-you," Leia says wryly. She doesn't mind sitting for a few more minutes.

She misses Han, so much. She misses Luke, even if he's still with her sometimes, all blue and insubstantial and remote. She misses Amilyn, heroic to the last, and Venna, and she misses Lando, who left on an important mission and never came back. And Ben, the only child of her three marriages, and maybe the best case that something about the first one had really been wrong.

There's an impatient growl behind her.

"I wasn't _sulking_ ," she says, turning to the disapproving Wookiee. Her last surviving former spouse, most likely.

Chewbacca tells her, in Shyriiwook, that he is also in pain, as she is, but that she would do better to howl her grief the Wookiee way than hold it inside.

"I miss them," she says, the tears breaking through, and Chewbacca surrounds her in his furry hold. "I miss them, and I'm jealous of the kids getting to be right at the beginning of their story, and I hate that we're left as these broken pieces." She looks up at Chewbacca. "You have to promise me, when I'm gone, you'll go back to Kashyyyk and marry a nice Wookiee lady and forget all this human nonsense, okay?"

Chewbacca tells her he might go back to Kashyyyk, but he will never forget his human spouses, and anyways more likely he's not going to survive any longer than she is, given that they are both determined not to let the child of their marriage kill the child that their spouses mentored.

"I think they're going to survive," Leia says, so tired. Chewbacca keeps holding her up. "I think maybe they won't even fuck it up."

Chewbacca asks her if it honestly doesn't bother her that their relationships don't follow moiety.

Leia shrugs.

It's a big galaxy. A marriage creates a small enough space to not get lost in, if you're lucky, however you make one.

"I think the Force is with them," she says, and Chewbacca groans agreement.


	2. Chapter 2

They ask General Organa - Leia, she keeps telling Rey to call her - to perform the ceremony. Rey has no idea what to expect; she's never been to a wedding before, and neither has Finn, and Rose is usually pretty good about explaining things but she says marriages were really different where she grew up, that you had to have genetic kin, which obviously doesn't apply to any of them.

Poe is too excited to be any use; he gets all flushed and bouncy when you bring it up, but then it's just all hand-squeezing and embarrassing gratitude, like the wedding is a favor they're doing him.

"From his perspective, it is a favor," Rose says, when Rey tries to ask if this is normal for brides. (Brides is the word, right?) "None of us grew up with these high-society fourways. It's like we're the ones learning his language so we can all talk."

Rey is good at languages, so this is a heartening comparison.

Leia helps Rey and Finn get ready - they're all refugees, so nobody has very much, but she finds someone who can lend Finn a nice sash, and she puts a fancy braid into Rey's hair. She tells them that if they were marrying on a moiety planet their Morning parents would be fussing over them, and to whatever extent they're identifying as Morning, she'd like them to think of her as moiety-kin. Rey suspects that Leia is also doing the fussing for Poe and Rose, though. The Morning and Evening people have to get ready in separate rooms - this is apparently a rule of weddings - and Leia keeps ducking out and coming back.

Finally, though, Leia leaves and doesn't come back, and there's a long couple of minutes while Rey and Finn look at each other nervously. Finn takes her hand, on one of the glances-towards-and-aways, and it feels like a lifeline.

BB-8 wheels into the room and burbles, and they follow out.

Rose and Poe are walking in from the other side, into the common room where they're holding the wedding - the base is tiny, but it has a few non-essential spaces. This one has the droids in it, and chairs occupied by Chewbacca and some surviving Resistance friends of Poe and Rose, and a sort of wreath of discarded cables on one of the walls, with a few wilting flowers poked into it here and there.

Rey doesn't really notice any of that, though, because Poe is beaming at them, and Rose is holding on to his arm and looking determined, and they're both stunning.

Rey is pretty aware that Finn is the heart of their collective relationship - he's the star that separately captured their three wandering planets. She's not sure it would have occurred to any of the rest of them to love each other if they hadn't all loved Finn first. And then, arriving in the Finn system like the end of a hyperspace jump, finding these other new worlds to explore... and now she gets to _keep_ them, to _live_ here...

Leia, standing in front of the wreath, arranges them into a square, Morning and Evening facing each other, and says some words that Rey doesn't really follow about hope and beginnings. Rose will probably remember it all - she looks like she's listening intently, although there's also a chance she's just figured out how to solve some outstanding problem and is rebuilding infrastructure in her head.

Rey doesn't think she could swallow right now, her throat feels so closed with anticipation. Finn has a tight hold on her hand, and she's gripping back just as hard, like any minute they could be fighting sucking vacuum instead of this safe, quiet room. Poe looks so eager to get on with it that it's verging on impatience. When Leia asks him to take Finn's hand, Poe's hand is out and reaching before she's even finished her sentence.

Rey takes Rose's hand next, and now they're a box, or a ring. Then it's time for Rey to drop Finn's hand, which she does with a pang, even though she knows there can be more handholding later. They've all talked through, all together and in various pairs, how their marriage is going to work, and one of the big questions had been whether Poe was really okay with Rey and Finn having a physical relationship. Poe had concluded that he wasn't sure he would want to be married to people who had grown up believing that something was wrong but had decided to do it anyways, but could accept a marriage with outsiders who had never shared his taboos. That makes sense to Rey, and, anyways, she can feel that Poe isn't bothered on a deeper level, however much he'd had to thrash through his acceptance in his surface thoughts.

Rey takes Poe's hand, diagonally. His hands are warmer and sweatier than Finn's, and he grins at her like this is the best thing he's ever thought about doing. Finn takes Rose's hand, underneath theirs - Rose is short - and now they're a ring once-twisted, a symbol of parity and balance.

This is it, Rey realizes. They're married.

She is Morning, and part of the Morning, and part of the Day, in balance with the Evening, in balance with the Night. She can be the opposite of Evening but reach out to it; she can be apart from the Night without having to fight it.

She remembers wanting someone to show her her place in everything: now she has one, almost shocking in how right it feels. She thinks of the mosaic in the Jedi temple, and the cave underneath. There's a difference, she thinks, between the flow of dark energy, and the choice to act in fear, or hate...

Rey realizes that Finn, Poe, and Rose are all staring at her, and then that she's levitating slightly and Poe and Rose are having to reach up to keep holding her hands. She lands with a thump and Finn gives her a little friendly nudge with his shoulder, like, hey, what was _that_ all about.

"Are you done with your mystical insight?" Rose whispers loudly.

Oh, Rey loves Rose.

Rey nods at her, blushing a little, and looks back towards Leia, trying to smile like she's paying attention.

Leia gives her a little admonishing look, like, yes, the Force is woven through your marriage like it is through everything else, but please keep your feet on the floor for the duration of your wedding.

"Let Morning and Evening recognize your union," Leia says, and, oh, that's the end, they're done! Poe kisses Finn immediately, and so Rey kisses Rose, and then Poe grabs Rey and kisses her while Finn gets Rose in a big dramatic clinch, and then Finn reaches out for Rey with his arm still around Rose, and they kiss too, and Poe kisses Rose from the other side. One of the pilots hisses, but BB-8 trills loudly and starts rolling in circles around all their feet, drawing everyone's attention instead.

"Congratulations," C-3PO says in his officious way, and Chewbacca is hugging everyone, and most of the pilots are shaking their hands. Finn keeps catching Rey's eyes, like, isn't this amazing? Can you believe it? Us, really, we get all this? Leia makes them all bend down for forehead kisses, except Rose, who she can reach, and then shoos them out the door. There's food waiting on the Millennium Falcon, and also privacy, an otherwise limited quantity on the base.

Traditionally, the Morning and Evening couples would have one wedding night and then the Day and Night couples would have a second one the next night; they've decided to forego all that in favor of piling in together and seeing how it works out. It was Poe's idea or possibly Rose's but Rey is glad; she doesn't want to be out of arm's reach of any of her spouses right now. By the time they get the ramp up everyone is giggling. They're giddy, and ridiculous, and married.

"I bet we can get Rey to levitate again," Rose says speculatively and lasciviously, and Rey can feel the heat in all of them; the heat, and the warmth, and the potential.

Tomorrow, they can save the galaxy, but tonight, they have each other.

**Author's Note:**

> I started thinking about this right after seeing Last Jedi, but I never got much beyond Poe reacting to Finn/Rose with "great, now we can all get married!" The Finn/Poe part was solid, but the problem I had was that I like both Finn/Rey and Finn/Rose (I think there are some great shippy moments for both!) - and cramming the four of them into the sedoretu box meant having to choose. And then it hit me the other day that if I was going to post this before new canon messes with everything, I only had a few days left to do it, and so it turned into a story about taking the people you have and trying to make something work, and Poe grappling with the rest of his partners not sharing his moiety taboos at all.


End file.
